March 29, 2010--The Tiger Returns
In case you just got back from another planet you know that Tiger Woods returns to action, sorry, the golf wars next week at the Masters.
CBS, which has the rights to broadcast the tournament, is beside itself with excitement. They expect their TV ratings will approach American Idol numbers and commercials are selling like proverbial hotcakes.
If you are wondering how Tiger will be received, there is some insight in a recent USA Today poll which reveals that 75 percent of the public—the general public, not just golf fanatics—welcome him back and 60 percent want him to win, though only 43 percent have a favorable view of him. (Full polling results linked below.)
Clearly Americans are a forgiving people. Just as they also love a spicy scandal. Before news broke of Tiger’s off-the-course escapades, he was viewed favorably by 85 percent of us. And then of course it plummeted and he became the favorite butt of late-night jokesters, including ones who were having their own similar problems.
We loved every minute of this. Most of us, and I mean us, couldn’t get enough of Jay Leno and New York Post headlines—“Cagey Tiger” and “Tiger’s Birdies” come to mind. And of course there was the parade of porno stars and cocktail waitresses who daily titillated us. We waited eagerly for the latest tapes of his raunchy cell phone calls and equally panted and snickered with a mix of excitement and outrage when a stream of text messages was sold to the Enquirer and other publications.
Tiger even managed to push the Octomom and Nancy Grace’s kidnappers and child murderers off her nightly Headline News show.
Some of this, of course, was pure schadenfreude. The guilty pleasure of enjoying news of others’ problems, hypocrisy, and ultimate fall from public grace. Especially the rich and famous and powerful we, in the first instance, placed on pedestals.
And just as that all-too-human pleasure began to fade, and perhaps a modicum of guilt began to intrude upon that enjoyment, if the miscreant came before us and, with tears in his eyes (and it is most frequently his), took responsibility for his transgressions, confessed that he was receiving help for his “problem” either in a secular, recovery-community manner, or from a higher authority, with tears in our own eyes we offered forgiveness. Being sure, of course, to tune in to all his subsequent appearances in the hope that we would see signs of genuine contrition and rehabilitation. Or, in their absence, again take exquisite pleasure in witnessing a relapse.
This is a curious phenomenon. Seemingly universal, at least in the West. From at least early Greek times. More about this in a moment.
Talking with my 102-year-old mother about this the other day, wondering with her what is at the essence of this seemingly contradictory behavior—condemnation coupled with forgiveness--she said that people want to see news of car crashes, assaults, fires, and kidnappings for three reasons—“The other kind of news is boring, boring, boring.”
I agreed with that, having myself slowed down earlier in the day while on I-95 to crane my neck to get a better look at a car crash (there were thankfully, or not, no apparent injuries), but still I continued to think about the deeper sources for this dark attraction.
My mother said that she was looking through a recent issue of Elle magazine and read something by novelist Mary Gaitskill . Before I could exclaim—“You’re reading Elle?”—she said, “It was in an article about betrayed wives. Like Elizabeth Edwards and Eliot Spitzer’s wife, Silda.”
“Go on. This sounds interesting.”
“Well, it is. Gaitskill’s point is that often the wives being cheated on get turned into the villains while the husbands become the victims. John Edwards strayed, according to some, because Elizabeth was the bickering ambitious one in the family who pushed him to do things he didn’t want to do for himself.”
“I heard that and think it’s silly. No matter what kind of a person she might be doesn’t excuse his behavior. If he had enough of the relationship, he should have asked for a divorce.”
“I agree. But this is not what’s most interesting in the article. Here’s what I think helps explain part of what you are asking about the Tiger Woods situation. Let me read you just one sentence. Gaitskill says, ‘Perhaps it should be obvious: Adultery is a social threat that arouses raw anger and fear, which the bellicose then need to discharge rather than merely feed.’
“This for me gets closer to the truth. How things such as cheating on a wife, because it is so disruptive to families and communities, causes what she calls ‘raw anger.’ And since people are not comfortable feeling so much emotion, they have to find ways to discharge it—let it out—as well as feed it. She says ‘merely feed,’ but that still means feed. We seem to have to do both--feed our anger as well as discharge it.”
This felt profound. And useful. But it was a bit more than I was expecting from my mother who these days is more involved with dealing with specific and practical things—like health care reform issues and her own health, which continues to be remarkably good.
So I rang off, thanking her for sharing this and telling her I needed to do some more thinking about our appetite for other people’s bad news. Maybe, broadened now, to include that kind of bad news that is either a direct or metaphoric “social threat.”
The next day, another phrase from Gaitskill that my mother read to me got me thinking about Aristotle. About why he saw the tragedies of Athens’s great playwrights to be so essential to the wellbeing of their society.
He wrote that the course of a play’s tragic action should saturate the spectator with feelings of compassion, drive out his petty personal emotions, and so "purge" the soul through pity and terror. Through what he called catharsis.
Now, though I do not mean to equate whatever might be tragic about Tiger Wood’s fall with, say, Oedipus the king’s, there is still something about what Aristotle 2,500 years ago perceived to be the public’s need to be saturated with while witnessing these kinds of royal downfalls—the need to purge the seemingly contradictory emotions of both pity and terror.
Like it or not, there is the continuing strong human propensity to experience both. And in doing so to proceed with life, to heal the social fabric when it is rent by these kinds of transgressions. We need to be able to find ways to heal.
The Greeks figured it out and so have we: they had Aeschylus and Sophocles; we have Dr. Phil and Oprah.
CBS, which has the rights to broadcast the tournament, is beside itself with excitement. They expect their TV ratings will approach American Idol numbers and commercials are selling like proverbial hotcakes.
If you are wondering how Tiger will be received, there is some insight in a recent USA Today poll which reveals that 75 percent of the public—the general public, not just golf fanatics—welcome him back and 60 percent want him to win, though only 43 percent have a favorable view of him. (Full polling results linked below.)
Clearly Americans are a forgiving people. Just as they also love a spicy scandal. Before news broke of Tiger’s off-the-course escapades, he was viewed favorably by 85 percent of us. And then of course it plummeted and he became the favorite butt of late-night jokesters, including ones who were having their own similar problems.
We loved every minute of this. Most of us, and I mean us, couldn’t get enough of Jay Leno and New York Post headlines—“Cagey Tiger” and “Tiger’s Birdies” come to mind. And of course there was the parade of porno stars and cocktail waitresses who daily titillated us. We waited eagerly for the latest tapes of his raunchy cell phone calls and equally panted and snickered with a mix of excitement and outrage when a stream of text messages was sold to the Enquirer and other publications.
Tiger even managed to push the Octomom and Nancy Grace’s kidnappers and child murderers off her nightly Headline News show.
Some of this, of course, was pure schadenfreude. The guilty pleasure of enjoying news of others’ problems, hypocrisy, and ultimate fall from public grace. Especially the rich and famous and powerful we, in the first instance, placed on pedestals.
And just as that all-too-human pleasure began to fade, and perhaps a modicum of guilt began to intrude upon that enjoyment, if the miscreant came before us and, with tears in his eyes (and it is most frequently his), took responsibility for his transgressions, confessed that he was receiving help for his “problem” either in a secular, recovery-community manner, or from a higher authority, with tears in our own eyes we offered forgiveness. Being sure, of course, to tune in to all his subsequent appearances in the hope that we would see signs of genuine contrition and rehabilitation. Or, in their absence, again take exquisite pleasure in witnessing a relapse.
This is a curious phenomenon. Seemingly universal, at least in the West. From at least early Greek times. More about this in a moment.
Talking with my 102-year-old mother about this the other day, wondering with her what is at the essence of this seemingly contradictory behavior—condemnation coupled with forgiveness--she said that people want to see news of car crashes, assaults, fires, and kidnappings for three reasons—“The other kind of news is boring, boring, boring.”
I agreed with that, having myself slowed down earlier in the day while on I-95 to crane my neck to get a better look at a car crash (there were thankfully, or not, no apparent injuries), but still I continued to think about the deeper sources for this dark attraction.
My mother said that she was looking through a recent issue of Elle magazine and read something by novelist Mary Gaitskill . Before I could exclaim—“You’re reading Elle?”—she said, “It was in an article about betrayed wives. Like Elizabeth Edwards and Eliot Spitzer’s wife, Silda.”
“Go on. This sounds interesting.”
“Well, it is. Gaitskill’s point is that often the wives being cheated on get turned into the villains while the husbands become the victims. John Edwards strayed, according to some, because Elizabeth was the bickering ambitious one in the family who pushed him to do things he didn’t want to do for himself.”
“I heard that and think it’s silly. No matter what kind of a person she might be doesn’t excuse his behavior. If he had enough of the relationship, he should have asked for a divorce.”
“I agree. But this is not what’s most interesting in the article. Here’s what I think helps explain part of what you are asking about the Tiger Woods situation. Let me read you just one sentence. Gaitskill says, ‘Perhaps it should be obvious: Adultery is a social threat that arouses raw anger and fear, which the bellicose then need to discharge rather than merely feed.’
“This for me gets closer to the truth. How things such as cheating on a wife, because it is so disruptive to families and communities, causes what she calls ‘raw anger.’ And since people are not comfortable feeling so much emotion, they have to find ways to discharge it—let it out—as well as feed it. She says ‘merely feed,’ but that still means feed. We seem to have to do both--feed our anger as well as discharge it.”
This felt profound. And useful. But it was a bit more than I was expecting from my mother who these days is more involved with dealing with specific and practical things—like health care reform issues and her own health, which continues to be remarkably good.
So I rang off, thanking her for sharing this and telling her I needed to do some more thinking about our appetite for other people’s bad news. Maybe, broadened now, to include that kind of bad news that is either a direct or metaphoric “social threat.”
The next day, another phrase from Gaitskill that my mother read to me got me thinking about Aristotle. About why he saw the tragedies of Athens’s great playwrights to be so essential to the wellbeing of their society.
He wrote that the course of a play’s tragic action should saturate the spectator with feelings of compassion, drive out his petty personal emotions, and so "purge" the soul through pity and terror. Through what he called catharsis.
Now, though I do not mean to equate whatever might be tragic about Tiger Wood’s fall with, say, Oedipus the king’s, there is still something about what Aristotle 2,500 years ago perceived to be the public’s need to be saturated with while witnessing these kinds of royal downfalls—the need to purge the seemingly contradictory emotions of both pity and terror.
Like it or not, there is the continuing strong human propensity to experience both. And in doing so to proceed with life, to heal the social fabric when it is rent by these kinds of transgressions. We need to be able to find ways to heal.
The Greeks figured it out and so have we: they had Aeschylus and Sophocles; we have Dr. Phil and Oprah.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:12 AM
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